Eugene Saenger

Dr. Eugene Saenger (March 5, 1917 – September 30, 2007) was an American university professor and physician. A graduate of Harvard University, Saenger was a pioneer in radiation research and nuclear medicine. He taught at the University of Cincinnati for more than thirty years.

From 1960 until 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger, a radiologist at the University of Cincinnati, led an experiment exposing 88 cancer patients, poor and mostly black, to whole body radiation, even though this sort of treatment had already been pretty well discredited for the types of cancer these patients had. They were not asked to sign consent forms, nor were they told the Pentagon funded the study. They were simply told they would be getting a treatment that might help them. Patients were exposed, in the period of one hour, to the equivalent of about 20,000 x-rays worth of radiation. Nausea, vomiting, severe stomach pain, loss of appetite, and mental confusion were the results. A report in 1972 indicated that as many as a quarter of the patients died of radiation poisoning. Dr. Saenger received a gold medal for “career achievements” from the Radiological Society of North America. In 1994, the families of the patients sued Saenger, the University of Cincinnati, and the federal government. In 1999, the families won a $3.6 million settlement.